Bookspotcentral interview with Carlos J Cortes

The interviewer opened with:

Carlos J. Cortes’s debut novel, Perfect Circle, is one that is so polished and exciting you might expect it to have been written by someone with many more novels under his belt. It’s a novel that, as the back of the book states, “asks if man and nature are fated to clash - or if the right man can break the cycle.”

I was impressed with the book’s tightly wrought narrative, the suspenseful fast pace of the plot, and the realistically motivated characters enough to ask Carlos if he would grant me the privilege of doing an interview with him, and I and the staff at BSC are pleased that he kindly agreed to my request. And now, on to the questions . . .

You can read the complete interview at:

http://www.bookspotcentral.com/2009/01/on-the-spot-at-bookspot-central-carlos-j-cortes-interview/

How it all started

According to Darwin, evolution is a process that can be summarized as the survival of the fittest. Yet there are countless examples that seem to contradict that. Some of nature’s changes are too swift to be explained solely by linear evolution. I dreamed up a mechanism that could account for these leaps in evolution and the result was the Perfect Circle concept.

Writing it was another matter. From idea to proofread manuscript, it took eight years. But this is a little misleading. The original Perfect Circle was over half a million words. When I realized the impossibility of its publication in a single volume I separated the story into four parts and structured four novels:

Bad Water
This novel narrates the genesis of the International Mining Corporation in the Alaskan gold rush and tells the story of Hugh Reece,the corporation's owner, and his attempts to cover up a vast ecological disaster in Bangladesh. Paul Reece, a geologist and heir to the IMC empire, sides with the thousands dying from the Minamata disease caused by the corporation.

Moonshards
When at the end of WWII Patton searched the Mekkers mine for the III Reuich bank deposits he discovered that almost six tons of gems, spoils from the concentration camps, had dissappeared. In this adventure Paul Reece chases the gem's elusive trail.

Perfect Circle
Already published under the same title by Bantam.

Aftermath
The last novel explores the difficulties the survivors of a global cataclysm would face in an unstable world and the choices, sometimes harrowing, a group of humans must face to have a chance of surviving.

My agent spotted an opening for a SF work and, since Perfect Circle was the only part that could possibly slot into such a genre, offered it to Bantam and they eventually bought it.

The Prisoner is my next novel for this year and I'm hoping to have Light Bondage, on which Bantam has an option, ready for 2010. As to the remaining three novels that once were part of Perfect Circle... we shall see.